


Half Forgotten Recipe

by Carbon65



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Disordered Eating, Food, Gen, Hydra, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, Trauma, Underage Drinking, biochemists write fictional biochemistry, canonical near-death experience, lab-accurate science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 03:22:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5523593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbon65/pseuds/Carbon65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jemma Simmons is ten, she is growing up in a family where every child learns early on that food - good, nourishing food -  is yet another way to say “I love you.” </p><p>When Jemma Simmons is fifteen, she joins SHIELD.</p><p>When Dr. Jemma Simmons, PhD is twenty seven, she gets sucked into a big black cube. She’s lost herself somewhere along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half Forgotten Recipe

**Author's Note:**

> Originally Written for the prompt, "Learning to be loved"

When Jemma Simmons is ten, she is growing up in a family where every child learns early on that food - good, nourishing food - is yet another way to say “I love you.” When she was younger, her mother or her father cooked every night. And, now she is older, she or her siblet get drafted. Jemma, Al, Peter, and Mandy, they usually make simpler food - tacos, or shepherd's pie, or some kind of pasta. Her dad likes quick and easy with lots of salt and cheese. And, her mom has a tendency to try out complicated, fancy things even on weekdays.

On holidays, the entire clan descends upon someone’s home. Well, in full disclosure, there are several days of preparation before the holiday, during which children of an appropriate age are lent out to the relative hosting to help with cooking and cleaning. It’s loud and hectic, and there’s a press of people so that even when you’re alone in a room, you never feel like you’re alone.

And, by the holiday itself, everyone is a little bit cranky and kind of sleep deprived. The day itself feels like something she’s supposed to be savoring. And, so, she feels kind of guilty for feeling wrong, but it still feels wrong. She takes her plate into the corner and eats her turkey or her ham and listens to her grandmother tell stories from the war. Her cousins go, and play. They are rambunctious. She listens.

So, yes, Jemma Simmons knows her way around the kitchen. She learned to rice her potatoes before she mashed them, and how much pectin to add to raspberry jam, and just how thick to roll her cookies. She knows the family recipies. She knows how to cook.

 

Jemma Simmons leaves home when she’s fifteen. She'd like to say it was a shock. Maybe it came as a shock to her aunts and uncles. But, Jemima had quietly finished the GCSEs the end of last term, and now she's contemplating what A levels she should pursue.

The recruiter from the SHIELD boarding school comes at dinner time. Over her father's Sheppard pie, they learn about a prestigious school in America none of them have ever heard about. The SHIELD boarding school promises an excellent education. Any degree she wants to pursue, and a career offer afterwards. They told her parents the dorms were supervised, not just by older kids, but by an adult. The dining hall has all sorts of healthy options. Jemma will socialize with children her own age. She will have structured, rigorous, challenging work. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.  
How can they say no.

The Sandbox, because that’s what the school is called, is not quite like what they described to her parents. Most of the students are older. A few are seventeen, but most are college aged. The dorms are supervised by adults. But, supervision is as likely to come in the form of making them hack their way back into their computers to do homework as provide encouragement. The homework is hard. The dorms are too loud. The library is too quiet. There are hormones flying everywhere.

Even though Jemma’s never thought that she could be good at it, she learns to adapt. She immerses herself in it. She learns to work late into the night, pushing and prodding against the deadlines. She argues about literature and science and human nature with some of the brightest minds around, and finds herself able to keep up.  
She learns to shoot.  
She learns to shoot to kill.  
She learns to lie.  
She learns to be a spy.

At the Sandbox, they eat in the cafeteria at long tables off of trays. The food is kept warm on hot plates. It’s not easy to tell if it's made with care or not; it is easy to tell that it's made in an industrial kitchen. There are days Jemma eats too much there. And, there are days when she lives off of cereal and poptarts and black coffee because it's all she has time to eat between being in one lab and another, and then writing up her work.

Jemma feels at home at school. She knows the shape of the world, and her place in it. It’s the first time she’s felt like she maybe, sort of fit in. She isn’t quite right, but she is closer to who she is supposed to be here than anywhere else she’s been. And, that makes going home hard. The holidays are quiet, exhausted periods where she frantically tries to recover from everything at school, and frantically tries to catch up on everything she missed. Sometimes, she feels like she’s losing her roots. She knew, of course, that Aunt Marie got a new puppy, but never met the dog. And, the twins barely recognize her from when she used to babysit them. More worrying, the layout of the kitchen changes in her absence, so she no longer knows where the cheese grater lives. It’s a subtle reminder that she no longer belongs here. ...And since she doesn’t belong in her dorm, not really, it’s not her space, she’s not sure where she belongs.

 

Jemma celebrates her twentieth birthday by getting her bachelor's degree, getting drunk, and getting into a PhD program. SHIELD kicks her out of the dorms in the sandbox and makes her go live in an almost off campus apartment. Jemma shares it with a roommate. SHIELD still manages to find someone who is four years older than she is. She overhears her roommate complaining to a friend one day. Apparently, the chasm between twenty and twenty-four is massive. 

Even though she’s the same age as her students, Jemma is required to TA during her first year. It’s a common requirement, and SHIELD aims to simulate as many common requirements as they can. SHIELD PhDs need to be worth as much as a PhD in the real world, or something. She meets Leo Fitz on her first day of TA training, over pizza. The others sneak out and get smashed on empty stomachs. She and Fitz talk about Brownian Motion and Fast Fourier Transforms. And, it’s Leo Fitz who comes to her rescue when she gets up in front of her first class and manages to forget everything that was supposed to be in the syllabus.

Between classes, teaching, research, and no longer living in a dorm where someone else cleaned the hallway, kept the toilet plumbed and took out the trash (as long as it was delivered to the communal receptacle), Jemma struggles to remember that she has to eat. She forgoes breakfast mostly because getting to campus at 7:45 to teach and research is too early. She usually squeezes in lunch between running gels or doing a time point with her cells. She might eat a candy bar or something before she goes and does the physical training in the afternoon. And then she microwaves something for dinner. Not because she can't cook, but because she's too tired and too busy to clean more than a fork. It's not the prepared food in the dining hall, or the solid, caring food of her childhood, but it's a moment to herself.

When she goes home over the holidays, she's even more of a stranger than before. Her parents are proud of her, but no one has the remotest idea of who she is or what she does. Her aunts and uncles talk about her research and are wrong in their conclusions. The simplified, sterilized publicly consumable science makes her grind her teeth. Her cousins and siblets don't know what to make of her at all. And, she knows she doesn't belong.

 

She joins Phil Coulson's team when she is twenty-five. She and Leo Fitz celebrate with cheap beer on the roof of the observatory and arrive hung over to their first day of work. Fitz makes her Earl Gray with milk and honey, bangers and beans, even though he spent half the night with his head in the toilet. Fitz cooks solid, stodgy, british food. He buys her solid, stodgy, _british_ food. It’s like eating her way through Harry Potter sometimes, but she loves him for it.

They're heard of Coulson, but he's a bit weird. Which, yes, may be someone in a glasshouse, but, still. Coulson is weird. He was there, during the Chitauri invasion last spring. They heard about it and got pulled off to go do clean up. And, the rumors said he died. But, here he is. Innocuous and more like an accountant than a secret agent. (Jemma learns later than Coulson is a CPA, but that's not the point.) He likes toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato slices and he drinks coffee like it's going out of style.

Melinda May is infamous: infamous and kind of scary. Melinda May walked out of situations that killed twenty other agents with barely a scratch on her. May's stare is unnerving, and when she makes Jemma do PT, she just sighs before showing her how to stand for the fourth time.  
May drinks tea or pink lemonade, or she drinks whiskey and water and makes eggs when she can't sleep. May has trouble sleeping a lot.

Ward is quiet. He's friendly. He jokes about Lola with Coulson, and makes friends with Fitz about the tech. Ward isn't unsettling the way May is unsettling; you just know that May could kill you. Ward is unsettling in his own way. And, he's all about efficiency eats beans and spaghetti-Os straight out of the can without heating them. Sometimes, Ward will leave a pot of hot coffee standing on the stove in an enamel pot. The coffee will be strong and sweet and smokey. Coulson calls it cowboy coffee and drinks tea.  
Coulson commented once, and Ward just turned to him. “I’m an adult, sir. I have a gun permit.”  
“Fair enough, Agent.”

Skype joins the team, and she’s the queen of ramen, taco shops, and black coffee. Jemma hadn’t believed it was possible to burn water consistently, but Skype manages. (Burning water once or twice because someone is distracted is one thing; the girls dorm at the sandbox got evacuated at least once a month when someone set off the fire alarm making tea, popcorn or toast). So, Skye doesn’t get kitchen duty. Like, ever. Oh, she might be asked to wash dishes, but she doesn’t cook. She just finds them awesome food when they go out into the field. And, somehow, it all works.

Jemma’s first year on Coulson’s team is also the first year that she doesn’t spend the winter holidays with her family. She calls her mom a few weeks before Ward, May and Coulson team up to make a turkey and give thanks for whatever the hell Americans are so thankful for, and says that she can’t come for Christmas. The lie she tells is that she will have to work. The truth is that she’s afraid to come back to her parent’s house. She’s afraid that it isn’t her home, anymore. She’s afraid of the chasm between herself and the people who share her DNA.

 

Jemma goes to work for HYDRA when she is twenty six. She doesn’t celebrate the new job with bubbly nerves and bubbly champagne and a bubbly friend. Coulson explains the need quietly in the lobby of an unnamed rehabilitation center in California.  
She cries quietly on the cracked tiled floor of the ladies room, while her best friend learns how to swallow, again.

The HYDRA labs are some of the coldest places she’s ever been. There’s a current of fear running through the labs, as palpable as the climate control. The scientists are sealed inside this bubble of mistrust and fear, isolated from the rest of the world and each other. The security guards check their bags on the way in and the way out to make sure they don’t carry anything out, but the security guard doesn’t know what they carry in their heads. They come and go, but they never really leave work. 

Jemma gets up in the morning, earlier than she did when she worked directly under Coulson and had to train with May. It’s still dark out when she wakes up, and there won’t even be a grey hint of twilight for hours. She’s always tired.  
She drinks black tea for breakfast, just tea without milk or lemon. The milk in her refrigerator always seems to go bad before she can finish it, and she never seems to remember to go to the grocery store to replace it.  
She dresses in her HYDRA-approved scientist’s uniform. Coulson never had standards about how his scientists should look. She probably could have worn whatever she wanted, as long as it conformed to the SHIELD safety protocol requirements for what she was doing (cover your legs, stomach, chest, and shoulders, eye protection as needed, closed toe shoes and tie up your hair). HYDRA has different ideas about how a scientist should look. It’s not so far from the way she’d dress herself, but it still feels alien and intrusive.

She gets to work by seven, and stays until seven. She’s not sure where Hydra missed the memo that science isn’t a nine to five (or seven-to-seven) job. There are days that things come together quickly, and days that things don’t work. Having to run to the stockroom to get more Tris can cost twenty minutes - not because she’s lazy, but because as soon as she’s down in the stock room, she also realizes that she’s out of hydrochloric acid, and it takes seven minutes to get 1N Hydrochloric acid. Because HYDRA doesn’t understand science.

She gets precisely 35 minutes for lunch, at exactly noon. She usually takes it, unless it conflicts with her experiment. She drinks tea, maybe gets a sandwich from the coffee cart on the first floor. The food is ridiculously expensive for what is essentially fast food. And, she almost never finishes it. The food becomes like ashes in her mouth.

She works through the afternoon, drinks more tea, works some more. She goes home no earlier than seven, but sometimes, she stays until eleven. It’s dark, or getting dark, as she goes home. She eats something from her rare saturday trips to the grocery store, usually something frozen. There are fewer vegetables and more salt than she is used to. The food is still ashy, though.

As time goes on, she works more and more.  
She eats less and less.

She goes for weeks without talking to her family.  
She goes for weeks without talking to her friends.  
She goes for weeks without talking to her team.  
She barely talks to her coworkers.

She sometimes talks to herself.

By the she finally gets the gel, and she call Coulson, she’s lost at least fifteen pounds.  
She could carry her groceries home in the bags under her eyes.  
She doesn’t have any color to her skin, it’s been so long since she’s seen the sun.

 

When she is twenty seven, Bobbi Morse rescues her. Well. Bobbi Morse scares the shit out of her, and then rescues her.

She goes back to SHIELD, where everything is the same, and everything is different.

Fitz ... she doesn’t know what to feel about Fitz.  
When she left, Fitz wasn’t really there. He was out of that precarious state of COMA and moved into an indeterminate stage of RECOVERY. In some ways, RECOVERY was a lot scarier than COMA, because there was always the possibility that today was as good as it was every going to get, and that Fitz would never walk, would never talk, would never build again. They celebrated the fact that he could swallow something. Skye posted on their anonymous message board after he took his first steps. She knew when he started back to work again, his hands shaking and his words fleeting. But, Jemma didn’t have to face the new reality, not until she came back.  
The Fitz that is here, he is and he isn’t her Fitz.  
She doesn’t know what to say, doesn't know how to say it, doesn’t know when to wait and when to help.  
He gets angry. He gets angry and frustrated and afraid...  
...And she gets defensive and guilty and angry. Because this is her fault. Well, perhaps not her fault alone, but her fault.  
She could have...  
She should have ...  
She could have saved him.  
She should have saved him.  
And, she failed.  
Sometimes, it feels like her best friend is lost forever. Sometimes, it feels like a piece of her was extinguished in the underwater hypoxia.

Coulson is different. Maybe because the weight of SHIELD has fallen on his shoulders. Because he - not Fury - is the director of the agency, in whatever state it may be in. And, because he, unlike Nicholas J Fury, god rest his paranoid soul, underwent a field promotion. Maybe that’s why Coulson is distant, and doesn’t let her come close any more.

May is - and isn’t the same. She’s still strong. She still regularly kicks Jemma’s ass when they train together. She still protects Coulson, protects SHIELD, protects Skye and Jemma and Leo and Bobbi... and May spends so much damn time protecting everyone else that she doesn’t notice the cracks forming in her own SHIELD.

Ward is gone. And, when he comes back, she wants to kill him. She wants to take a gun, and shot him in the face. But, a gun would be too clean a death. It would be too tidy for what he did to her. For what he did to Fitz. She wants to rip him limb from limb. She wants to take his living body, and lower it into a vat of acid and watch him cook alive. She wants to wrap him in plastic and watch him suffocate to death, bringing him back from hypoxia at the last possible minute, before condemning him to it again. She wants Ward to feel what he cost Fitz. She wants Ward to know what he cost her.  
She wants to let the anger inside of her consume everything, because maybe the fire will burn itself out, and she won’t have to hate herself for being weak and useless and spineless any more.  
She wants to be the girl she was before the shipping container.  
She just wants to be that girl.  
She doesn’t know when she stopped being herself.  
She doesn’t know when she stopped caring about herself, or her needs.  
She doesn’t know when she stopped eating at all.  
She doesn’t know when the migraines started.  
She doesn’t know when the anger inside burned her through.  
She doesn’t know when she got so angry that she will let the world burn.  
She doesn’t know when she stopped caring that she lit the match. 

 

When Jemma Simmons is twenty-seven, one of SHIELD’s big, black cubes sucks her inside. Nothing more, nothing less.  
When she is twenty-seven, she is taken to a completely different world.

She comes through into gentle sunlight, the slanting light of a late summer afternoon. Water laps quietly against some unseen but audibly close shore. The trees hide the water from her view. They’re not species she recognizes - not that she really knows anything beyond the standard set of Maple, Beech, Willow, Oak, Pine and Spruce. She is here, and it is calm, and the water sounds gentle.

The people here, because they are people as much as anyone she has met (tails or no), take her back to their home. They feed her. They wrap their arms and their tails and their hands around her, and hold her. She remains stiff, because she does not know them, does not trust them, does not trust herself.  
They feed her some more, and give her a blanket, and tell her to rest.  
And, for the first time in a long time, she falls asleep for the sake of sleeping.  
That’s all she does, for days and weeks. She sleeps, and cries, and walks along the beach. They feed her until the hard planes in her face and her body start to soften, again. They hold her until the hard planes in her mind start to soften, too.

And eventually, after what might be an eternity and might only be a few hours, she asks them if she can help prepare the food. They look at her skeptically, and take her to the chief. She frowns, and reminds her that she is still healing. She asks what will happen if she is not healed enough to spend the time and compassion on the food that it needs.  
Jemma shrugs, a gesture foreign here, where indecision is marked by a slight quirking of the tail and a lift of the eyebrows, and the words spill out.

In the end, they let her. In the end, they feel they must. After all, she has spoken their creed. And, this is the one way to let her live her word.

Oh, Jemma Simmons can prepare food. But, it’s from the people in the black cube that she relearns how to cook, and relearns that food is love.


End file.
